Mitch Stephen has been a self-employed RE investor for 20+ years. His real estate investing career started at the age of 23 when he read “Nothing Down” by Robert Allen.

REAL ESTATE INVESTOR:
Mitch, together with his wife, Tommi, and his daughter, Shannon purchased their fair share of local houses. Their company, Independence Day, Inc., has bought and sold over 1,400 properties in and about San Antonio, Tx since 1996. This company specializes in buying distressed properties with OPM and the selling of those owner financed properties.

EDUCATOR:
Mitch offers Online Education, Group Coaching, and one-on-one Mentorships as it relates to all the aspects of Owner Financing and owner financed properties.

Mitch forged the creation of a mass texting software, LiveComm.com to help solve problems that arise when you get numerous calls from bandit signs and other advertising efforts to sell your houses.http://LiveComm.com.

The main reason Mitch wanted this system was to reduce the number of calls from potential buyers (that asked the same questions over and over) to a group of the most qualified buyers, saving time for the sales team. This solves that and much more to streamline you selling process. Listen in to find out what a time saver this system can be for you and your sales team.

Resources:

Transcript:

Welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit podcast. Coming to you, straight from the smallest big town in Texas, with your host, mentor and owner/financing master, Mitch, AKA, Be the Bank, Stephen. The possibilities of life without a J-O-B, start here. So, grab your pen and paper and listen up.Y’all just might figure out how to fail forward, to financial freedom.Mitch Stephen: This is Mitch and welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit podcast. I am your all knowing and gracious host, Mitch Stephen and I’m going to be talking to you today about livecomm.com. Why I use it, how I use it and how to get you some technology into your sales department and there’s other ways to use it as well. I’m going to tell you why I like livecomm, why I love livecomm. I’m going to be talking to you about how to increase your down payments and how to shorten the length of time that you have houses in your inventory. Right now, I need to take a little pause for our sponsors and I’ll be right back.What if you could capture the phone number of every person who ever called your company? What if you could track the success or failure, of every advertisement, effectively and affordable? Then imagine, being able to text all those prospects, paying just pennies to reach the entire group?

and watch the informative video on the homepage. Other mass texting companies want to charge you five cents per person on the list. At 5,000 people, that’s $250 per text. Who can afford that? With livecomm, you can text 5,000 prospects, for under nine cents total. Livecomm has so many features, it’s impossible to tell you about them all here. Contact

REInvestorSummit.com/Live today. Mass texting, done right. Mass texting you can afford.Hey investors, are you tired of struggling to find financing for your real estate transactions? Are you tired of overpaying your hard money, or private investor? Introducing Capital Connection, the world’s first and only true source of sources. We at Capital Connection focus 100% of our efforts, time and resources, on finding the absolute best sources in the nation. We then connect you directly with those sources. It’s really that easy. Please go here to learn more now. Reinvestorsummit.com/capital. That’s reinvestorsummit.com/capital.Mitch Stephen: All right, I’d like to thank my sponsors. They’re the ones that make my world go round. Oh, man. You hear it all the time, “I can’t seem to sell my houses. Where do you find customers to buy your houses? How do you sell your houses so fast, Mitch? How do you get such good down payments, Mitch?” I’m fixing to tell you how I do it.

What You Need to Be Successful in Owner Financing

Now, as you know, I specialize in the strategy niche, called, owner financing. The art of owner financing. I buy houses with other people’s money and then I sell those houses with owner financing. So, essentially, my buyer gives me a down payment and promises to make payments to me for 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, 30 years and that’s my strategy of choice. I get paid up front and I got a cash flow, coming in every month and I think it’s the best of both worlds, and most importantly, I’m not a landlord. That’s my niche, that’s my strategy.The two main things you have to find; you have to find a house. You have to find the money and then I guess we can add a third thing. Then you got to find a buyer for your house. What makes the strategy so great is, I’ve taken the banks completely out of the equation. When the recessions hit, I’m still in business, full force. I haven’t slowed down a bit. I don’t need the banks to help me buy houses, because I’m buying houses with other people’s money, OPM. I don’t need a bank to sell the houses and my customers, who are buying my houses, don’t need a bank and they don’t need to go get a loan from a bank, because I’m giving the loan. I’m taking a down payment and collecting their payments, for years and years. The banks are completely out of the equation and I’m not affected by whether the banks want to loan money or don’t want to loan money and I really don’t care.That’s why I love the business. I hate depending on cycles and this takes me out of the cycles. What I want to talk to you today about, is selling my houses and how I use livecomm to sell my houses. When we get towards the end of the program, I’ll talk about some other things I use livecomm for, like how I’m using it to raise private money and how I’m using it to find houses. How I’m using it to track my advertisements, the success or the failure of my different kind of advertisement ideas. It’s just a really wonderful tool.

How LiveComm Helps Agents

Let’s start out with, what is livecomm.com? Livecomm provides phone numbers, okay? Regular phone numbers. Now pretty numbers, just regular phone numbers and you get to choose what area code these phone numbers have. You may order one number in this county and then another couple of numbers in another county, if you’re sitting right on a boundary line. Those might be two different area codes. You look local. Then, every single one of those phone numbers, has a text distribution list attached to it. So, you get a phone number, it has a text distribution list attached to that phone number. It also has a land line bucket, but let’s talk about the text distribution list first. What does that mean? Any time that number gets an incoming caller, the livecomm system will decide if it’s a cell phone, or a landline. If it’s a cell phone, it’ll put that phone number into the text distribution list, so that you can text those customers at will.Now, every livecomm phone number also comes with a landline bucket. If it decides that the phone number is a landline and not a cell phone, then it’ll put the number in that bucket. I’ll explain to you later, why that’s important. That’s the basic function. Could you imagine having a business and if you used livecomm phone numbers, throughout your business, you would have the phone number of every person, who ever called your company and all your customers. You can actually figure out, where did they call you from, based on the number that they called in on. Now, these phone numbers also have call forwarding capabilities. Not only can you forward it from one phone to another, but let’s say you had five salesmen. You can also forward your sales line to ring on all five salesmen phone number, at one time. It goes up to nine phone numbers, that you can do that with. Whoever answers the phone first, is the winner of the lead. That’ll cause some competition among the salespeople there.You can also forward those phone numbers to voice messages, so that when someone calls your livecomm.com phone number, they’ll be sent right to a recorded message. I’m going to show you how I use that strategy. One of the most important features of livecomm, if you don’t get anything else, get this. It automatically populates your text distribution list, automatically. It’ll take the landlines and drop them into the land bucket. Another feature, that livecomm offers, is the, hello auto response. You can check a box, if you want the hello to go out, or you don’t want it to go out. What the hello is, when the livecomm system recognizes that there is a pristine caller, this incoming caller has never called your company before, you can choose to send a hello message, after they hang up. It’s a text, of course.Let’s say, a brand new customer calls your company, they listen or talk to whoever it is they need to talk to and then they hang up the phone. Within a few minutes, they get a text from you and it could say anything you want. You know, “Thanks for calling homestogo.net. You’re going to be put on an automatic text distribution list. You’ll be texted automatically, every time I have a new house in the inventory and if you ever want to unsubscribe, just hit the unsubscribe button, next time you’re texted.” You can put some kind of hello message like that. I always like to inform people how to unsubscribe, because if they’re not looking for a house, or they’re out of the market, or they’ve already found a house, I don’t want them to stay on the list. Go ahead and unsubscribe. That’s a neat feature, to kind of start branding your name.Now, here’s a new feature that hasn’t been around for too long. It’s just been implemented here at livecomm. One of the things that livecomm does, is they always want to hear from their customers. Like, “What features do you wish this program offered, that it doesn’t offer now?” There was a very interesting feature, that they came across and it has a lot to do with the real estate agents and real estate brokers and the traditional real estate business was asking for this and it’s called, instant call connect. What happens there is, say you have a livecomm number in a magazine and it’s an advertisement for your company. In that advertisement, it says, “Free recorded message.” So, someone calls to listen to that recorded message and as soon as the incoming caller gets connected to the recorded message and starts listening to it, you would receive a text saying that someone from the phone number, 210-669-4135, is listening to your recording right now. If you know that the recording is 30 seconds long, then you can just wait 30 seconds and then you could just dial that number and say, “Hello.” To the person who had just called for the free recording.If also offers the incoming caller the chance to connect to a live person, by just holding for a few seconds, after the recorded message. You’ll include that in your message. “If you want to speak to a live person, please just hold for about five or six seconds and someone will come on the line.” That’s called, instant call connect. I love that feature, because it’s in real time and when you get that text on your phone, you know that you can call this person. It really works good too, when you’re trying to buy houses. This is where the landline bucket works so well. When you’re trying to buy houses, you don’t care what phone they’re calling from. Cell phone or landline, you don’t care. Soon as you get the text message, that someone’s listening to your recording, you’re going to call whatever number it is, and you’re going to try to talk to that potential motivated seller.That’s one of the reasons we have the land bucket, is because you get a lot less phone calls when you’re looking for houses, than when you’re selling houses. Those phone calls, when you’re looking for a motivated seller, they’re very important. You don’t get a whole lot of those calls, compared to buyers, so you’ll want to call them. What’s neat about it is, when you get that text, you know that that motivated seller is listening to your recording right now. You know he’s on the other end of that phone, right now. You know he’s there. That’s an important feature.

How LiveComm Helps Agents Sell Houses

Let me tell you how I’m using this to sell my houses and then we’ll talk about some other strategies. Let’s say, you have 10 houses. You would get on the livecomm system and you would order 10 phone numbers. One for each house. Instead of having to answer the phone and talk to potential customers and say over and over and over again, “This particular house is a three bedroom, two bath. It’s 1,200 square feet, on a half acre lot, built in 1969, with a composition shingle roof, that’s approximately 5 years old and a gas hot water heater and an electric stove and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada,” and have to say that a thousand times a day. In my strategy, when I’m trying to sell a house, I put 20 bandit signs around the neighborhood, where my house is. If I have 10 houses, that I’m trying to sell right now, then I have 200 signs around the neighborhood. Plus, I have a sign in the front yard of every house, so that’s 210 signs. If you’ve never done this before, you won’t believe how many phone calls you can get.There’s been times it’s 50-100 phone calls a day, depending on the season and if it’s income tax return season. You know, just how things are going, where your houses are. The point is, your salesmen, even you, you can’t answer that many phone calls a day and be an effective salesperson. You’ll go nuts. You’ll be crazy. You’ll be the worst sales person on the planet, one and a half days of phone calls. This is how I figured out to gate and get the incoming callers to vet themselves. I assign a phone number to each of the 10 houses and then I make a recording for each house. When people call that number and those signs have my livecomm number on it, it says, “Home for sale. Owner financed. 123 Main Street and then the livecomm number.” They call the number, it goes to a recording the recording tell them everything they need to know. I do not give out my phone number, or the sales peoples phone number, at the end of that recording.At the end of that recording, I tell the customer, if they’re interested in the house and they think this might be the house for them and their family, then get in your car, drive to the house, get out of your car, walk around the house, look through the windows. Check out the neighborhood and if you still believe this is the house for you and your family and you have a substantial down payment, as described in the recording, then call the sales number in the front window of the house. Now, my two sales people, who were running away from the phone, because it was ringing too much and people were asking them all the same questions, over and over again, are now fighting over the calls, because I cut the 100 phone calls a day, down to 8 really good prospects a day. The people that are calling them, from the phone number in the front window, on the house. That’s the 11th number. There was 10 numbers, one for each house and then there was the 11th number, was your sales line and your sales line was forwarded to your sales people.That’s a really good strategy, to keep from driving your sales people nuts. Here’s the thing, when you’re getting that many calls a day and I’m just looking at my phone right now, I have 4,600 people in my text distribution list, who are looking to buy a house with owner financing and they have not unsubscribed. I mean, there’s an auto schedule feature on this livecomm offers, also. On the 1st and the 15th of every month, automatically a text goes out to every single person and it says, “If you’re no longer in the market to buy a house, or you want off this list for any reason, just hit unsubscribe now.” On the 1st and 15th, I have it set up to go out. I don’t want people on my list, if they don’t want to be there. If they’re not looking for a house, I don’t want them on there. Still, 4,600 people in my home town, of San Antonio, Texas, have not unsubscribed. They want my text messages.Every time I get a new house, I just say, “Homestogo.net has another house for sale, with owner financing. Click this link to get pictures and details.” You send it out. You want to send out these text messages, in 140 character, tweet like text messages. You really want to try to stay under 140 characters. Now, whenever I get a new house in inventory, I can hit 4,600 people, who are looking for an owner financed house.

Best LiveComm Strategies

Here’s another strategy that I use. I’ve taught it to the sales people. Whenever you have a house, you’ve got a client that did what you asked them to do. They went out and they looked at the house. They walked around the house, they looking through the windows. They checked out the neighborhood and they go, “Man, this is really the house for me and I really do have that 15% down payment.” They call the sales line, get a hold of the sales person and the salesperson schedules an appointment to meet with them and show them the inside of the house, at 7 o’clock in the evening. When 4 o’clock rolls around, my sales person sends out a text message to 4,600 people and says, “I’m going to be over at 123 Main Street at 7 o’clock, with the lights on and the doors open. If you want to come see the house, please come over to the house at 7 p.m. tonight. I’ll be there.”Well, he goes to show the house to one person and there’s 5, 6, 7, 8 people in the front yard and now he’s showing the house to 9 people, instead of one person. This is why my down payments are going up, because I have multiple takers and I get to pick which one has the most money, or which one’s the best deal for my company, to own or finance to. I have already six sales in this month and it’s only the fourth. I have six sales and I’m collecting $48,000 in down payments. This is a really important number, because that payment directly affects what I make this month. I mean, because, I’m building cash flow, but I can’t eat future cash flow. I need some money so I can eat and drink and put gas in the car today. Those down payment is what does that. Now, I pay my sales person 25% of the down payment. Let’s see here, 25% of $48,000. I’m still keeping $36,000 this month, for myself, that I have. How many people could live off of $36,000 a month? You know, and not even need to touch your cash flow, or ever sell any of your notes?That’s the importance of it. I’m also getting much better people, than I used to get it. I’m also finding them faster, so my houses are on the market for shorter periods of times. As we all know, when you’re selling a house and it’s vacant, nothing good can happen. I’ve never gone to a house and found it to be repainted beautifully and the windows clean and the yard mowed and edged. If I go there and something’s changed about that house, it’s usually gone backwards. It’s been graffitied or someone broke a window, or someone kicked in a door, whatever. Shortening the time that it takes to sell your house, can save you a ton of money. Not to mention, the interest and the holding cost and the taxes and the insurance and all that. Bad things have happened at vacant houses, you know? That’s one of the ways I’m using livecomm to up my down payments and to find customers for my houses faster.Let’s talk about systems and advertising and how to track your advertising. With livecomm phone numbers, you can actually see how well your advertisement’s doing, or your advertising strategy. One of the signs that I put out, all over neighborhoods, in the example, I had 10 houses and I had 20 signs around those houses each, for a total of 200 signs and then one in each front yard, so that’s 210 signs. One of the strategies I use, to build my home buyers lists, was to put up a generic sign, all over town. That read, “List of owner financed homes. Free recorded message and then a livecomm number.” People would call, that were interested in owner financed homes and my recording simply said, “Thank you for calling homestogo.net, because you’ve called this number, your cell phone has been automatically placed into a text list and you’ll be notified any time and every time, homestogo.net has a new home in their inventory, that they’re willing to owner finance.”That’s the end of it. You can put up 300, 400 of those signs, around a town as big as San Antonio. Believe me, the amount of calls that sign got and because I assigned it, its own specific number, that sign, the free list of owner financed houses, I know how many people have called that sign and how many people have been added into my distribution list, because of that one sign. The other reason I like using free recorded messages is, they’re non confrontational. People will call a free recorded message, when they would not call a live person. There’s two reasons, or at least two reasons for that. Non confrontational, meaning, they’re not going to have to talk to a live person and get a hold of a salesman and have to fight their way out of a conversation, so they can hang up. Also, time. What time are they calling? If someone sees free recorded message at 2 o’clock in the morning, they might call that free recorded message, just to listen. And I’m going to capture their phone number, using the livecomm system.If all you have is a number to your business, or to a person, no one’s going to call that number at 2 o’clock in the morning. They’ll do it out of respect, or they just won’t think that you’re even going to be there to answer the phone, because you’re closed. This is important to the conversation about buying houses. A lot of people send out postcards to suspected motivated sellers. Everyone knows to put a phone number on their postcard, so they can get a call and they can try to negotiate the purchase of the house. I think if you’re really smart, you put two phone numbers on there. One, to a direct person and you say that, “To contact Bill immediately, call 210, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. For a free recorded message, call this other number.” I’m still going to get their phone number, either way.They can call direct, or they can call the recording, but I’m going to get their phone number. It’s just, I’m giving myself a better chance to get their phone number, because that free recorded message? Yeah, they’ll call that at 2 in the morning. They’ll call that Sunday at 10 o’clock at night. They’ll call that at 5:30 in the morning, when they’re up early reading the newspaper and going through their mail. They’ll call that free recorded message, when they won’t call a person direct. The reason why the landline bucket is there, is because if someone calls that free recording from a landline and they’re a potential motivated seller, I don’t care what phone they’re on. I want that phone number and that’s where the landline gets so significant, is when you’re trying to find motivated sellers.

How LiveComm Can Help You with Your Current Systems

Okay, I’m going to switch gears now on you and talk about systems and how LiveComm can help you with your systems. In my book, My Life in 1,000 Houses; 200 Plus Ways to Find Bargain Properties, the first 30 pages describes how you would set up your business, so that when it comes times to stop being a one man show and then start hiring people to help you facilitate your business, you won’t have to go back and change a whole bunch of stuff. By using LiveComm numbers and certain key places, you can have … Let’s say, your buying and your selling site. You got a LiveComm number for buying and you got a LiveComm number for selling. You forward them. In the beginning, they’re probably both forwarded to your cell phone number, because you’re the only person in the business. Most people start out as a one guy shop.As you grow, you’re going to want to find someone else to help you sell your houses. You’ll find other people to help you find houses and you’ll be able to forward those phones away from you and then one over to John over there, because John’s your salesperson, who sells your houses and then you’re going to forward the motivated seller website, over to Bill, because Bill’s your acquisitions manager. Now, you’ve been able to effectively delegate off those two departments, without having to change numbers, change your business cards, change your letterhead, change phones. You haven’t lost any goodwill or any advertising and it’s really important that you check out that first 30 pages of, “200 Plus Ways to Find Bargain Properties“, to make sure that you start your business in such a fashion, that when it comes time to grow your business and to hire people into your business to take over certain tasks, that you don’t have to go back and lose all your good will, or change all your numbers on your cards or your letterhead and everything.It’s really worth reading, that first 30 pages. I mean, the whole book’s worth reading, but if you’re just starting out your business, then why don’t you read that first 30 pages before you make some major mistakes. It also helps, like I said, LiveComm numbers, they’re really cheap. They’re $2 a month, per phone number. Literally, I have 15 houses for sale right now, if not 20 and there’s a phone number for every house, because every house has its own unique recorded message, about that house. Whenever I sell that house, I don’t delete the numbers out of that text message. I just change the description of that phone number. You can add a description to these numbers, any time you want to. I have those particular phone numbers, described as 123 Main Street, 567 Jones Street. I assign this number to Jones Street and that’s what it reads, 123 Main street, that’s the name of that phone number. Well, when I sell 123 Main Street, I just change the name of that phone number to 5678 Jones Street, whenever I assign that number to another house.I do not empty out the text distribution list. The people in that list are still looking for owner financed houses and they’re still important to me. I don’t really care what house they called on, or what sign they called on. If they called from an, “I want to buy an owner financed home” sign, then I’m keeping them until they unsubscribe. You can use livecomm.com to set your business up right and be able to just forward numbers as helpers, or employees come and go. You can just forward the number to the next person, who’s taking that department. You don’t have to lose phone numbers.

How LiveComm Can Help You

They’re also one of our sponsors on our shows lots of times and watch the video on the homepage. It’s about a four minute video. It’ll tell you a lot about what I just told you now, but it’ll have maybe a little more succinct and it’s fun to watch. If you want to sign up for LiveComm, you can sign up there, right on the site. If you need some help you just go to support@livecomm.com.

We also have an affiliate program, so if you want to refer this to your friends, who are in the real estate business, or real estate agents, you can do that too. Let me tell you, livecomm.com is not just for real estate investors or real estate agents. I mean, think about, I don’t know of any business in the world that really couldn’t benefit, most likely, from collecting the phone number from every prospect that ever called their company.Let’s think about the pizza delivery guy. You got a pizza house over here, delivers pizza. What if they’re slow on a Tuesday, at 6:30 or 7 o’clock? They’re slow. Well, what are you going to do about it? You got three pizza delivery guys, sitting around on their thumbs and the ovens aren’t cooking pizzas and nothing’s going on. Do you think that that pizza shop has the phone number of everyone who ever called their shop, ordering a pizza? Course they do. Probably 95% of those phone numbers, are cell phones. LiveComm has this ability to also import really, pretty huge lists of phone numbers, if you want to. The pizza company could import all their phone numbers, using a text file, into the system and any time they’re slow, they can just start texting 100 to 200 people at a time.Now probably, a big pizza shop in a decent city, might have 2,000, 3,000 phone numbers, but I don’t think you’re going to want to hit all those phone numbers at one time. You may get overloaded. This is what’s going to happen. You’re slow at 7 o’clock. You send out a text to just 200 or 300 people at 7:01. In that text, you give them your special offer, your irresistible offer. “For those who order a pizza in the next 15 minutes, we’re not only give you the pizza you ordered, but we’re going to throw in a medium pizza.” Or whatever it is. You send out that text, the phone will start ringing within seconds. Within seconds, because we all know how quickly people look at their text messages. Especially versus how quickly people look at their emails. If they even look at them at all, because everyone’s getting flooded with spam emails. That’s the way the pizza shop might use it.Let’s talk about someone who does business by appointments. Say, like a massage therapist. If a massage therapist has an appointment at 4 o’clock and then the person who has that appointment calls in at 2:30 and cancels, that’s an hour and a half before the appointment. What’s the chances that this massage therapist is going to be able to fill that hour long commitment, that just went blank, because the client canceled? That might be $60, $70, $80 that this massage therapist is out, because the person canceled and didn’t leave very much time before the appointment, to refill it. If you have livecomm.com, you could text every single one of your clients and say, “Hey, I just had a cancellation for 4 o’clock, is anybody up for an impromptu massage at 4 o’clock? First person to call wins.” Hit the send button. The chances are, that 4 o’clock appointment opening is going to get filled.I could go on and on about how you could use livecomm, but think about a florist. If you had customers walk in and you say, “You know, why don’t you fill out this sheet sir. All the important people in your life. When is your anniversary date? What is your wife’s name? Do you have kids? What are their names? What are their birthday? When are their anniversaries?” Put all the important dates down and livecomm has a scheduling tool and you can schedule text messages to go out in the future, on certain day and times. A florist could set up a system where all their clients that have filled out the sheet, get notified seven days, four days and one day, before the special event happens. Always asking the client, “You have an anniversary coming up, do you want us to send flowers? Do you want us to send flowers? Do you want us to send flowers?” That’s what they do, they send flowers, right? A florist. You’re planting the seed, you’re making it easy for them. You’re sending them a text, you’re helping them out.I think this could hugely increase the business of a florist or a masseuse or a pizza delivery place. The list just goes on and on and on. I don’t know any company that really doesn’t need it.

I hope you enjoyed this and I hope it got you thinking about how you can use livecomm in your business. All right. This is Mitch and we’re out.You’ve been listening to the owner/financing master, Mitch, be the bank, Stephen, on the Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast. Let us now blatantly, without apology, drive you towards financial freedom, by offering you a whole bunch of free stuff. Go to reinvestorsummit.com and get you some. And you all come back now, you hear?